


periodic

by akaparalian



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU - Comicverse
Genre: (sort of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, M/M, POV Second Person, Reincarnation, giftfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-20
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 20:55:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/727830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Periodic. Pe·ri·od·ic. <i>Adjective</i>. Recurring at intervals of time; occurring or reappearing at regular intervals; intermittent. Or, it takes them four tries over the course of one hundred and fifty-plus years, give or take, but they finally get it right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	periodic

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a birthday present for my darling friend Megan. JayTim is fun. Second person is even more fun. With the two combined, I found writing this to be fabulously entertaining. Also, I didn't want to tag it as 'main character death', because.... reincarnation. But. Anyway. Soundtrack: Us - Regina Spektor, From Finner - Of Monsters and Men, Never Let Me Go - Florence + the Machine.

The first time you meet him, you aren’t Tim and he isn’t Jason. You don’t really have a name - or rather, you have many names, given to you throughout your life by many different people. None of them stick, though, until the day when a dark-haired stranger with scars all over his arms kneels down to offer you a wineskin and a small cloth-wrapped parcel that smells incredibly like fresh bread.

You shift, drawing your worn red blanket tighter around your shoulders, and the man just smiles, an almost sardonic twitch of the lips that somehow irritates you and makes you flutteringly happy at the same time. “Don’t be scared, little bird,” he says, and you hesitate for a moment longer before taking both of the offered items, drawing them protectively into yourself with quick, fearful movements. You have had sixteen years to get used to the idea that any personal possession is in constant jeopardy of being taken away, and this man somehow seems to understand that, despite his well-cared for appearance, because he smiles again, this time with an understanding nod, and reaches out to pat you lightly on the head before straightening up and brushing the dust from the knees of his breeches. He turns to go, and you watch with wide eyes as he strides powerfully back toward the lighter main street.

“Thank you,” you call finally, your voice as rough as anyone else’s from the smog and grit of this heavy city; you’re half-certain he won’t have heard you, but he pauses, turns back, smiles at you one last time.

“My pleasure, birdie,” he says, and you think that name should feel demeaning, should frustrate you, but you can’t help feeling a little honored and a little cherished; he means well, you’re somehow sure of that, he’s noting your nimble quickness, and not in a bad way. It feels… more personal than it probably is. You’ve never seen this man before in your life, you’re sure of it, but he feels familiar. Warm. You shudder a little, looking down as you feel a flush creep into your cheeks, and by the time you look back up, he’s completely gone, having disappeared into the ever-moving throngs just outside the neck of your quiet alley.

You don’t see him again for almost thirty years.

\---

The second time, you have a name - Timothy, only heir to the Drake family’s rather impressive fortune. It is 1893 and things are going splendidly for your father, whose very wealthy shipping line is doing quite well despite the minor economic crisis they’re calling the “Panic of ‘93”. You’ve learned all about it, of course – your tutors are doing their level best to turn you into a fitting inheritor of not only your father’s money, but also his business, and that involves knowing the ins and outs of the country’s economy well enough to predict its twists and turns. You’re also studying a great many other things, including French, German – your father insists, saying that you’re likely going to need to interact with Germans in a business sense with the way things are going internationally – and, entirely uncoincidentally, ballroom dance, because your parents are quite fond of hosting these _stupid_ events.

You sigh lightly to yourself, letting your eyes slide shut as you lean your head against the wall; you’ve staked out the most shadowed corner of the room, hoping to avoid notice. Many of the most important families in industry are represented tonight not only by their patriarchs, but by their daughters, and while you’re sure they’re lovely girls, you would just about rather eat burning coals than be paraded around by your mother and father, introduced to girl after girl after girl with overly made-up cheeks and fluttering eyelashes. Your father would then lean down to you and whisper about each one of them, “You know, Timothy, you must start considering a wife. Now here’s a lovely girl, Cassandra’s just your age…” Just _thinking_ about it drives you mad, and you sigh again and shift your feet, leaning against the wall even more.

“Well, well. What are you doing all the way over here?”

You stiffen, your eyes snapping open as you straighten instinctively out of your tired slouch. You straighten up even more once you realize who’s found you moping in the corner: Jason Wayne, the adopted middle son of the exceedingly powerful, exceedingly wealthy Wayne family, one of your father’s primary competitors. He’s smiling wolfishly at you, looking just disheveled enough that he can still pass as elegant and, of course, dressed to the nines, dark tailcoat overlayed on top of a vivid scarlet waistcoat. You cross your arms defensively, leaning back in a way that makes you look particularly aloof.

“I needed a bit of air,” you say calmly, your voice as level and distant as you can make it. Inside, your heart is pounding; of all the people at this party, Jason Wayne is probably the one that makes you the most uncomfortable. Not angry or terrified, just – tense. Unacceptably tense – you can’t keep on like this, you’ll probably have to interact with him quite a bit as you grow older. He’s only a little older than you – nineteen this year, if you remember correctly – you’ll undoubtedly be at all the same parties for the rest of your life. (The thought makes you groan, just a little bit. Not out loud, of course, but it makes you groan, regardless.) “And what about you, Mr. Wayne?” you ask, mentally shaking yourself back into focus. “You’re usually the life of the party.”

He chuckles a bit at that, coming a bit closer to lean against the wall an acceptable distance away from you (and if you scoot away just a little bit, it certainly isn’t anyone’s business). “I needed a bit of air,” he parrots back at you almost cattily, and you flush and look away. You don’t see it, then, when he moves, but you can feel his presence hot at your back and you shiver almost imperceptibly, your breath catching in your throat; there it is again, that tenseness.

“And,” he says, his voice low and humid in your ear, “I thought I might… get to know you, Timothy Drake.” Your name comes off his lips like honey and you almost choke on your own breath; you have never been more confused, more – _tense_. You begin to wish you’d suffered through the parade of sugary potential wives, because this burning – it’s worse. It’s so much worse, and it only magnifies when Jason’s hands dust over your shoulders and come to rest over the small of your back. This isn’t- _you_ aren’t- you can’t think straight, the room is spinning and your thoughts are completely out of order. You try to verbalize this, but fail miserably, producing only a choked-off gasping sound, and your eyes squeeze shut against the sensory onslaught as Jason chuckles into your ear, his breath tickling down the side of your neck.

And then as suddenly as he had arrived, he is gone – completely gone, you realize once you can bring yourself to open your eyes. He’s disappeared into the party once more, and hidden himself quite effectively among the twirling dancers and nattering society dames. You have a sudden feeling of unsettling déjà vu and for a moment you can almost catch the scent of freshly baked bread, but it almost immediately flies from your head and you attempt, mostly in vain, to collect yourself.

You won’t admit it to anyone – even yourself – but that… conversation… wholly terrified you, and not just because of Jason himself, and his actions; perhaps even more so, it’s your own reactions that have you covering your face with a hand and leaning back against the wall again, this time fully needing its support as a failsafe against your legs giving out. You realize with a shock that you’re not only tense, you’re… _aroused,_ in a way none of the girls your father has shown you at many a former social function has ever touched on, in a way that’s entirely terrifying because – no. No, you won’t even _think_ about it, you won’t acknowledge that it happened, you won’t accept that for the rest of the night, you can do nothing but look for Jason Wayne everywhere, and when you can’t find him, beg your father, a bit bewildered and concerned, to let you retire early.

You won’t admit that that night you sit alone in silence for hours, trying to process the actions and reactions of hours previous. You won’t admit that, once the rest of the house has retired, you furtively touch yourself, muffling your moans and whimpers in your pillow as you desperately try to pretend you aren’t thinking about Jason Wayne, about his burning voice and his burning words, about his large, warm hands and about what exactly he’d meant when he said he wanted to get to know you.

\---

You watch for Jason Wayne at every party for the next year, but you never see more of him than a glimpse from the corner of your eye or a flash of red from the center of the dance floor; by the time you make it to where you thought you’d seen him, he’s completely disappeared, as though he’d never been there at all. You _know_ he’s attending parties and business meetings and all of the other social gatherings where you’ve tried to find him, because after you’ll hear tittering stories of how he’s done something dashing and bold or swept this debutant or that off her feet and into a whirlwind two-week romance, but you never see him.

It takes a while to come to terms with the idea that he’s completely avoiding you, but as soon as you do you’re almost relieved; his avoidance means you’ll never have to acknowledge to anyone else the way he’d talked to you, the way he’d made you _feel_. As soon as you realize that, you promptly stop acknowledging them to yourself; better, you think, that it had never happened. And without Jason to say otherwise, it never had.

Several years later, you hear from your wife (Bianca, the daughter of a business associate of your father’s; it’s an entirely acceptable marriage, socially speaking, and that’s really the only thing that matters to either of you at this point) that he’s gone off to the war in Cuba, to fight as one of the Rough Riders; you think that it suits him, brash and dangerous. Months after that, your wife mentions in passing that he’s been killed; trying to save an injured comrade, apparently, and you don’t doubt that story at all. You think dispassionately that it’s a shame, that he was a good man; you _don’t_ think about his voice, you don’t think that sometimes you still think about him when you make love to your wife, you _do not think_ about the heat of him that’s now gone from the world. You nod and express a vague sympathy, and you attend the funeral when it’s held in the ornate old cathedral in the heart of the city, and you move on as though you don’t think about him in the quiet hours of every day.

You move on, and eventually, he moves on too.

\---

In 1945 you are in college, just finishing up your last year of medical school before you go on to professional, adult life; you are at the top of your class, detached socially but nevertheless well-liked. Your parents, everyone tells you, would be very proud; you personally doubt it a little, but then again they both died when you were twelve, so you suppose you’ll never know. You narrowly escaped the nasty outbreak of tuberculosis which killed them, and most people assume that’s got something to do with why you’ve chosen to devote your life to the study of medicine. It hasn’t – you’re more or less here because your high school advisor told you a smart boy like you should choose either medicine or law, and the very thought of becoming a lawyer bores you to tears – but it’s a nice story.

This time, you’re at your internship at a local hospital when you meet him. Jason Todd went to war here too, though a very different and entirely more devastating war; however, this time he’s come back, a grumbling veteran with the better half of his left hand missing. He grumps at you a bit while you perform his checkup, but you can tell he’s mostly just – what, embarrassed? Flustered? You think that it serves him right, because he’s made you feel that way, then wonder what on Earth would make you think that.

“Well, you seem to be doing fine,” you say with a smile, distracting yourself and scribbling down banalities on Jason’s chart. Now that you’ve _thought_ about being flustered, you sort of are; you glance up from your clipboard for half a second and his grouchy expression makes you way more fond than it should, considering he’s a complete stranger.

“I could’ve told you that,” he grumbles, and your own laughter surprises you, bright and bubbling. Jason seems surprised too, but also pleased with himself somehow; you spend a moment basking in each other’s happiness before you clear your throat a bit awkwardly and he leaves in a rush of lingering cigarette smoke.

You aren’t entirely preoccupied with him this time, but also different is the fact that he reappears: he comes in for another checkup two months later, on the last day of your internship, and this time before he leaves he asks if you’d like to get a drink after your shift. You accept without even thinking, and the two of you spend the evening drinking cheap beer and talking about everything from the ending of the war to sports to your families – in that case, both of you are vague and terse, and you quickly change the subject. It’s a good evening, and you leave wondering if maybe friends are all they’re cracked up to be after all.

(That night, you dream about Jason in formalwear, black and white and red and _heated_ , and you wake up past midnight achingly hard and gasping. By the morning, though, you’ve forgotten, or at least you tell yourself very firmly that you have.)

Jason’s there when you graduate medical school, he takes you out for drinks when you get your first job, he helps you move in to your apartment downtown. He’s quickly become not only your only friend but also the most important person in your life, and that’s why you absolutely hate yourself for the things you think about when you’re alone, especially after a night where he’s gotten a bit too drunk and leaned on you all the way home, or slept on your couch because his place was just too far away to go home to that night, or so much as _looked_ at you the right way.

And the awful part is, you live out the rest of your life that way. You watch him get married, get divorced, lose his job, then find work as a mechanic; he watches you rise in the ranks of the medical world and keep every single person except for him at arm’s length, if not farther. And the entire time, you have this sick sense of _wanting_ him, and a resulting shame every time he lays his hand on your shoulder or drags you around by your hand or so much as _looks_ at you when the two of you are alone. It’s wrong, you _know_ it’s wrong, know you aren’t supposed to – lust after your best friend, and you hide it carefully away. Sometimes it gets to be too much and you’ll slip down to the shady parts of town, places you’d normally never even think about being, and you’ll find some boy with dark enough hair or blue enough eyes and you’ll let yourself pretend for a little while. (None of them ever say anything when you cry out – “ _Jason, Jason, Jay”_ – but you can see a knowing sort of pity in their eyes, sometimes.)

It stays that way for almost forty long years, the both of you staying the same sort of close (but distant, always too distant, and you hate yourself for wanting to be _closer_ ); both of you date, and he eventually marries that nice girl who works at the diner down the street and then divorces her, though you never tie the knot yourself. You have a feeling that you tried that once while pining over him, and it didn’t end well, though you’re still not sure why you seem to recall things like that sometimes. After forty years, though, he’s once again the first to go, leaving you as suddenly as he’d come – he died quietly in his sleep, and you’d known for a fact that it had something to do with the cigs he’d been sneaking for years, even after he claimed he’d quit. You can’t hold that against him, though; you’d done the stern doctor thing a couple of times, lectured him about staying healthy and quitting smoking and not drinking so much but, really, those were things that made him happy, or at least seemed to, and you could never, ever deny him something that made him happy.

You last a few years longer than he does, but you, too, pass, just after your seventieth birthday; your funeral is very lightly attended, something you could have predicted easily. Your landlady attends, and Jason’s ex-wife, who you’d never quite been able to resent for the same reason you could never resent the smoking or drinking, because she did make him very happy for at least a little while; those two and a few colleagues from the hospital are the only ones there to watch the smoke of you curl up into air, blending almost perfectly with the cold gray sky. You rest in the blackness for several years, but eventually you’re pulled back to the light again, and this time your life and Jason’s are twined tightly together from a very young age.

\---

You gasp into consciousness, mind scrambling to catch up as your chest heaves for air. There’s someone – _there is someone in the room with you_ , and trained instincts take over as you dive for the weapons in your bedside table before you even realize what’s really going on. You leap and tackle and your knife is pressed to a warm throat all in one frenzied movement.

“Hey! Ease up, baby bird, it’s me,” and you let out a shaking breath as quietly as you can and sit back. Of course Jason would sneak into your house just in time to wake you up from your recurring dream about pining after him throughout history. Of _course._ You lean away from where you’d pressed him to the bed and stare at him distrustfully, your eyes already adjusted to the darkness of your bedroom well enough to tell he’s in full civilian clothes, though he smells kind of like he’s just finished a hard patrol through the red light district or something.

“What are you doing here, Jason?” you ask stiffly, looking down and away and hearing him shift on your comforter and trying to pretend your heart isn’t racing, you aren’t thinking about ~~remembering~~ imagining him whispering hot and wet into your ear, black and white and red all over, red to the tips of your ears because of the way his voice sounds.

“What, can’t I want to catch up with my little brother?” he says, sniffling a little bit as his words slur just so. “I was in the neighborhood, Timmy, thought I’d come say hello.”

“You’re drunk,” you say suspiciously, looking back up at him but very carefully not looking him in the eyes, and he laughs.

“Yeah, you think?” he says, sagging into the bed and running a hand roughly through his hair. You can feel him looking at you sidelong, his head tilted so that he can stare from under the fringe of his bangs. “Jesus, baby bird, why so stiff? You look like I pissed in your cornflakes or something.” He laughs again when you don’t respond, rough with smoke and the memory of yelling (you think for a second that maybe that’s what he would sound like postcoitus, but squash the thought down immediately).

You glare at him briefly before standing wordlessly, leaving him sitting there (sitting on your bed, probably leaving his smell – smoke and leather and gunpowder and all the things you’ve been telling yourself for months are only dreams – all over your sheets, not that you _care_ ) as you pad silently to the kitchen. Your apartment, you allow yourself to think for a moment, has never felt this small; you can hear him breathing, heavy and warm, from all the way in here, and you permit yourself the realization that if he’s anywhere near this loud, it means he more than trusts you with his life, and then you forget these things and busy yourself getting him a glass of water and some aspirin.

He accepts the glass with a sardonic smile when you get back, knocks most of it back with one smooth swallow, then lowers it to the blanket and looks up at you where you’re still standing at the foot of the bed. “Regular den mother, huh,” he snipes, and you swallow because – your _feelings_ for Jason Peter Todd are nothing like motherly.

You feel yourself blushing, and he obviously notices, even as inebriated as he is (you’re impressed, actually, at how clearly he’s speaking, considering he’s also sort of swaying where he sits and his face is flushed with the alcohol). “Awww, baby, did I embarrass you?” he coos, and you scowl at him.

“So, what, are you just here to pester me? It’s-“ you glance at the clock- “3 AM, Jason. Couldn’t teasing me have waited until I’d at least gotten some sleep?”

“I told you, I happened to be in the neighborhood,” he says, flopping out on your bed and grinning up at you as he lies spread-eagled. “And you’re cuter when you’re tired, little brother.”

You sigh and pinch the bridge of your nose, leaning over him to snatch the half-empty glass from his hand and put it on your bedside table before glaring at him as you sit on the edge of the bed. “You’re not going to move, are you?” It’s mostly a rhetorical question, but he shakes his head anyway and you sigh before lying down yourself, facing away from him and trying very hard to pretend he isn’t there at all – which gets distinctly harder when he snorts and tugs lightly on a strand of your hair.

“Fine, fine,” he grumbles. “Ignore me, whatever.” You resolutely do not respond other than to curl into yourself a little more, and he sighs and rolls over himself, a warm, out-of-place weight on the mattress that makes it harder to sleep than you’d really anticipated.

You eventually start to drift off, though, and your breathing evens out rather convincingly; you’re almost gone when you hear him shift slightly, feel his gaze bearing down on your back, then hear his head hit the pillow again. You almost miss the whispered “Night, baby bird,” and you’re half-sure you imagined it.

\---

You don’t expect Jason to be there in the morning, but he is. Not only that, but he’s sprawled all over the bed and, similarly, all over _you_ ; he’s got you pinned down with an arm slung almost protectively around your chest and a leg holding yours down to the mattress. For a moment, you close your eyes and let yourself pretend that this is how you wake up every morning, dappled in sunlight and with ~~Jason~~ someone, of course you don’t care _who_ , draped across you, but then the moment passes and you sigh your way into full wakefulness.

You at first attempt to extricate yourself without waking Jason, because if there is one thing you don’t want to deal with right now, it’s the awkwardness and teasing likely to result from making him aware of this particular situation, but he just draws you closer to him when you try to get up, the firm expanse of his broad chest hot against your back. He mutters something into your hair and you freeze, but you can’t make it out; he sighs and settles back down into sleep, and you wait for a minute, try to escape again, and fail a second time, and now he’s sort of nuzzling the back of your neck and you can’t _take_ this.

“Jason,” you say, sharp and firm, and when he doesn’t wake, again, louder; “ _Jason_. Jason, wake up.”

He starts against you, then freezes, and you can feel the moment when he realizes exactly who it is he’s wrapped around. But then, instead of retracting, he just chuckles in your ear, hot and _close_ – and there’s that déjà vu again – and wraps himself around you even more firmly. “Well, well,” he says, his voice strained with sleep but still lighter than you’re used to, like it was when he was drunk. You sort of figured he’d just had some really good booze or a successful patrol or something, but now you can feel his lips smile against your ear and you have never been so confused. “Isn’t this telling?” You squirm, uncomfortable, and he laughs and squeezes you tighter.

“Now, now,” he clucks at you, and you lean away from him as best you can, not sure at all what’s happening and what’s gotten into him or what’s gotten into you. “I know you’ve been having the same dreams as me, baby bird, I _know_ it,” and you freeze completely, stilling so suddenly that he chuckles again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you manage, breathless, and then “Let me _go_ , Jason.”

“Like hell you don’t,” he scoffs, but he does release you, if only to grab your shoulder and flip you around so that you’re face to face, closer than you’ve been to anyone in a while, at least when you’re not about to kick the crap out of them. “We’ve met before, right?”

“Of course we’ve met before, Jason, you’re being ridiculous. We’ve known each other for-“ _years_ , you try to say, maybe even hundreds of years, not that you’d say _that_ ; he’s shaking his head, though, and he’s growing more frustrated with you by the second, his eyebrows knitting and his voice transforming into a lower growl.

“Not what I meant, baby bird, and you know it,” he hisses, staring into your eyes until you have to look down, look anywhere but at him. “Come on, stop being fucking _coy_. You know exactly what I’m talking about-“

“What do you want me to _say_ , Jason?” you burst out, angrier than you’d realized you were. “ _Yes,_ I’ve been having dreams for months about you, about – knowing you, okay, but what do you want me to _do_ about it, why do you _care_ -“ You’re nearly shouting now, and he’s scowling, a storm passing behind his eyes and it’s almost enough to make you flinch.

“I want you to fucking _look at me_ ,” Jason growls, and you still, casting your eyes anywhere but at him, anywhere – “No, _look at me,_ Tim, don’t you fucking try and avoid this, you can’t run away from me, don’t even try,” and you can’t help it, you look, your eyes moving unwillingly to his and you can’t – it’s too much, you cannot deal with this right now. But when you try to move away, he grabs you and holds you close again, until you can feel his breath on your cheeks and your lips and –

Kissing Jason is more or less exactly like you’d thought it would be, at least right now, fevered and caustic; there’s more than a hint of teeth and it’s like you’re being hunted, being swallowed whole. You catch yourself moaning but you can’t _stop_ , especially when he roughly flips you onto your back and kneels over you, gripping your hair between strong, calloused fingers and nipping at your lower lip.

You finally have to pull away, gasping for air and breathing as though you’ve just run a marathon, and when you meet his eyes again they’re as wide and unsure as yours probably are. “ _Jason_ ,” you breathe, completely at a loss for words, and he laughs again, quiet and a little unsure.

“Yeah,” he answers, and he reaches out to brush a tuft of hair out of your eyes with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Yeah, I-“ He huffs another laugh, leaning down to rest his head on your shoulder, and you reach up hesitantly to put your arms around him.

 If you were more prone to overdone, overdramatic declarations, you might say “I’ve been waiting for that for longer than I’ve been alive”, or “I have been in love with you since sometime in the 1890s”. As it is, the only thing you can really think to say is, “It’s about damn time one of us grew a pair, I guess.”

He leans up to look at you for a moment, stunned, before bursting into laughter so strident and unrestrained it shocks you until you catch it too, giggles bubbling up out of your throat and turning into raucous laughter so loud that you’re pretty glad for the soundproofing throughout the entire apartment. Jason rolls over and draws you into him, the two of you laughing so hard you’re having a little trouble breathing for several full minutes, both of you eventually fading into more quiet chuckles, your head on his chest and your hand lying where it fell over his heart. You lapse into silence; there are plenty of things you should probably talk about, sure, but right now you’re really just thinking about whether he’ll stay for breakfast, and whether your cooking abilities will pass muster on a hungover – wait a minute. He’s supposed to be hungover.

“Were you actually drunk last night?” you ask suspiciously, though without any sort of malice, looking up at him as best you can without really moving.

He laughs a little sheepishly. “No. But I figured bein’ drunk was a better excuse for breaking into your house than curiosity,” and, well, he’s not wrong. You snort and snuggle into him a little more, shaking your head a bit.

“Asshole,” you say, but there’s no heat in it at all, and he runs his fingers through your hair absently. You are sort of amazed at how – different he is, how un-Jason and gentle, but then again, you haven’t exactly been yourself lately, either, so you can let it go. Those dreams, they put you off balance, and you suppose it’s only fair that they’dve done the same to Jason.

You’re both quiet for a while longer, Jason rubbing a pattern into your scalp with one hand while you watch the way the fabric of his shirt moves under your fingers. The sunlight is reaching in from beneath your blinds, bands of warmth streaking across your face, and your eyes flutter closed. You could almost drift back off to sleep but for the whirring motion of your thoughts, carrying you through multiple lifetimes again and again as you try to sort out exactly how much of what you’ve been dreaming about for months previous may or may not have been reality.

“Jason?” you say eventually, and his hand stills on your head as he grunts questioningly. “What-“ you say carefully, then hesitate, reconsider; you don’t even fully know what you want to ask _yourself_ about this yet, much less ask him. So instead, you start again: “What do you want for breakfast?”

He hums, considering, running a hand through your hair again and lets it rest there, fingers tangled and tugging lightly.  “You got eggs?” he asks at length, and you nod, sitting up slowly and letting his hand fall away, your hair slipping through his fingers in a way that feels – well. Feels like if he did that enough, you’d forget about breakfast entirely. You stretch before standing slowly and heading for the door, looking back before you leave the room to smile briefly over your shoulder.

You’re most of the way into making scrambled egg sandwiches, toast sitting ready on the counter beside you, when Jason reappears in the kitchen, coming up behind you to lean over your shoulder and examine the contents of the skillet.

“And here I half expected you to burn them,” he jokes, and you reach behind your head to smack him with your wooden spoon, not caring overmuch that it’s not particularly sanitary. He laughs and pinches your ass in retaliation, and your squawk of protest is met with louder guffaws as he ducks out of reach of your spoon, grinning wolfishly at you as you half-heartedly glare over your shoulder. You’re partially inclined to go and whack him anyway, but that might lead to you _actually_ burning the eggs, so you wait until you’ve finished the eggs and made the sandwiches and set them down on the counter and Jason has sat on one barstool and pulled the other one out for you before you take your revenge.

Instead of sitting down on the proffered stool, you come up behind him until your chest is flush to his back, leaning to nibble at the shell of his ear while your hands wander down his chest. He shivers, caught off guard, and you allow yourself a smile best described as dangerous before you reach suddenly down and mercilessly tickle his ribs.

Jason _shrieks,_ bolting upright and batting your hands away, and you double over in laughter that only gets harder when he thwacks you on the head and curses a blue streak that’s pretty impressive, even for him. He tackles you to the ground and pins you, arms boxing in your head while he growls at you, but it’s nothing like the aggression he’s shown to you in the past; his eyes betray him easily, and your laughter trails off suddenly because you’re out of air. Jason falls silent too, and you just stare at each other, both of you blindsided by – what?

“You’ve seriously been having the same dreams as me?” someone whispers, and it takes your brain a second to catch up enough to realize that’s you. You bite your lip, suddenly nervous, but Jason nods.

“The first time I met you,” he says slowly, “was – fuck, I don’t know, it’s fuzzy, but you were… starving, I guess. You were so _skinny_ , it was terrifying. I didn’t know you, but I tried to help you, gave you food or some shit. I don’t think I ever saw you after that.”

You’re nodding, remembering the way he’d looked at you, kinder than most people would think Jason Todd could be, even before everything that had happened to him (far, far before). “And then,” you say, your mouth once again running away without your permission; it’s a sensation you’re not used to, “in the – 1890s, I think, we were at a party, and you said-“ You cut yourself off, but Jason nods.

“And you reacted badly,” he breathes, his voice getting a bit distant but his eyes never leaving yours, “And I thought I’d ruined any chance with you, and it crushed me. So I avoided you, then went off to war and got killed-“

“And then in the forties you went off to war again and then we were - we were best friends,” you say, “for a long time, for forty-odd years. And I…” You trail off hesitantly, spend a moment debating with yourself, reviewing options and consequences. _Hell, I’ve come this far,_ you decide suddenly – God damn it these dreams have _done_ things to you, you’re really not yourself, but you can’t even bring yourself to care. You swallow hard and press on. “I was in love with you the whole time, and I spent the rest of my life hating myself, because-“

“No way,” Jason interrupts, indignant, and you blink back your shock. “No, are you kidding, _I_ was the one that was pining after…” He trails off, and you stare at each other intently for a pregnant moment.

“We’re idiots,” you say finally.

“You can say that again,” Jason grumbles, sitting up and scrubbing a hand over his face in exasperation. He looks back down at you, though, and a hint of a smile twists at his lips, apparently unbidden. He reaches down and twists his fingers in the hair at the nape of your neck, tugging questioningly, and you sit up and kiss him, your hands coming to rest on his shoulders. It’s different this time – much softer, though no less intent. There are soft noises creating a background hum; you’re not sure whose they are, but you find that you really don’t care, and you break away for a second to shift until you can slip into Jason’s lap, your legs straddling his as you sigh into him. He groans appreciatively into your mouth and you press yourself against him, arching as he moves his hands from your hair to the small of your back, where they hesitate for only a moment before sliding down to cup your ass appreciatively.

You shudder and groan and pull your mouth from his so that you can rest your head on his shoulder as he palms at you; you are quite suddenly made aware of the heat coursing through your body and you shudder, moving to suck a bruise into the junction of Jason’s shoulder and neck to distract yourself from moaning.

His fingers are playing at the waistband of your pajama bottoms; you sigh when they hook in the elastic and tug insistently, your own fingers wandering to the hem of his t-shirt. As soon as your pants are gone, he flips you over and presses you into the carpet, and both of you seal yourselves off from reality for a little while.

The eggs get cold, but at least they aren’t burnt.

\---

 Things go faster after that.

It’s tough when the rest of them find out; Jason doesn’t particularly care if they know, but you’re a bit nervous, and you do feel a swell of sick vindication when he and Dick shout themselves hoarse about it into the echoing silence of the cave. Bruce, though, doesn’t seem to care, and that – that surprises you, though not Jason and not an exasperated Dick, either.

“He loves us,” Jason says afterwards, when you wonder about it out loud, snug in the warmth of your apartment which has more or less become _your_ , plural, apartment over the last few weeks. “He wants us to be happy, and he doesn’t care if that’s together, I guess. I mean, he let you date Steph, huh?” You want to say it’s different, want to say Steph never killed (even criminals) and yelled and growled and grumbled, but you don’t say a word, just nestling your head snugly into the crook of his neck instead.

You’ve started patrolling together almost exclusively, too; those Gothamites, criminal or otherwise, that keep up with the exploits of the Bats more carefully than most murmur about it in the shadows when you pass during your nightly watch. None of them seem to theorize that the truth is what it is – that Red Hood and Red Robin are doing more at night than just fighting crime together – but they do take notice.

You love it: patrolling with Jason, heckling each other jokingly over the heads of the thugs you’re taking out, feeling him never out of reach, warm and solid behind you or beside you or in front of you (and you like it when he’s in front of you, because his uniform does very little to hide the fact that his ass is pretty much a gift from heaven, or maybe hell). It reminds you of the forties, when you two were young best friends without care except when you were apart. And anymore, you’re never really apart.

You suppose the word “soulmates” is kind of applicable, considering the two of you have agreed that based on the evidence, the conclusion that you’ve both been reincarnated several times, getting closer each time to the relationship you have now is… not really _obvious_ , but at least sort of reasonable. It’s still rather hard to wrap your head around, the idea that your very existence is twined with Jason’s in a way that sort of makes you giddy and blushy, at least where no one can see you, but it’s not an entirely bad idea, as things go.

After all, you think, smiling up at him fondly while you grapple across the night sky, you could have done a lot worse.


End file.
